According to AME info , a respected Middle Eastern economic news site:

It was an incredible revelation last week that the second largest oil field in the world is exhausted and past its peak output. Yet that is what the Kuwait Oil Company revealed about its Burgan field.

More below.

The peak output of the Burgan oil field will now be around 1.7 million barrels per day, and not the two million barrels per day forecast for the rest of the field’s 30 to 40 years of life, Chairman Farouk Al Zanki told Bloomberg.

But even the perpetually optimistic IEA has a lower forcast:

Last week the International Energy Agency’s report said output from the Greater Burgan area will be 1.64 million barrels a day in 2020 and 1.53 million barrels per day in 2030. Is this now a realistic scenario?

The only surprising thing about these statements is that they are not repeated in the mainstream media.

….it is surely a landmark moment when the world’s second largest oil field begins to run dry. For Burgan has been pumping oil for almost 60 years and accounts for more than half of Kuwait’s proven oil reserves. This is also not what forecasters are currently assuming. <snip>

The implications for the global economy are indeed serious. If the world oil supply begins to run dry then the upward pressure on oil prices will be inexorable. For the oil producers this will come as a compensation for declining output, and cushion them against an economic collapse.

I repeat this from an earlier post: Ali Samsan Bakhtiari of Bakhtiari Oil Consultants a “Senior expert at the Iranian National Oil Company recently wrote:

In my humble opinion, we should now have reached ‘Peak Oil’. So, it is high time to close this critical chapter in the history of international oil industry and bid the mighty ‘Peak’ farewell… At present, global oil output fluctuates around 82 mb/d as some institutions try vainly to push 2005 statistics towards 83 and 84 mb/d (as they always do). But they will be obliged to backtrack as ‘actual’ oil supplies fail to follow their ‘paper’ ones.

From the London based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre we have this new comprehensive survey of production at all the large non-governmental oil companies.

Clearly, it is no exaggeration to say that the world’s largest publicly quoted oil companies are now really struggling to hold production levels, with only a few managing to maintain their market share of global production.

But now we are starting to see proof that it is not only the non-governmental oil companies that can’t hold production levels.

And this is from today’s excellent and scary post by Stuart Staniford at The Oil Drum :

In the past, peak oil projections have used fairly low decline rates for [fields in production] FIP – 3%-6%. There are now several pieces of evidence that the FIP decline rate might be more like 8%.

It’s also been noted by the EIA that Saudi fields are declining by 5%-12%, and that Iran’s fields are declining by 8%-13%.

The gist of all this is that we may have a world oil crisis much sooner than anticipated. The effect on the economy will be staggering. Many of the political and economic issues we consider important today will seem trivial if this happens.

I wonder if my bicycle needs new tires?